Friday, July 1, 2016

Why this Jerusalem square is named for a caliph

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City Daily Photo bloggers are posting today on the theme "Look down."
Here we are looking down on Omar ibn al-Khatab Square, just inside Jaffa Gate.
Enlarge the photo a few times and you can pick out a bagel pushcart, shopkeepers, tourists, police, Arabs, and Jews.
Under the white canopy a bar mitzvah boy is returning from his bar mitzvah ceremony at the Western Wall, preceded by musicians with drum, flute, and shofar.

To take the looking-down photos I had climbed many tall stairs to reach the top of Phasael Tower observatory.
Built in the 1st century BCE, Phasael was one of three huge guard towers built by Herod the Great close to his palace in Jerusalem's Old City.
Its upper section, with the smaller stones, is a much later Mamluk reconstruction.

All of this is today part of the Citadel, the Tower of David museum of Jerusalem's history.

In this informative article by guides Aviva and Shmuel Bar-Am, we learn why the plaza was named for a Caliph:

One of the Old City of Jerusalem’s liveliest
streets is actually a small plaza called Omar iben Al-Khatab Square,
named for the second Caliph of the Islamic world.. . .

Brilliant,
sensitive, tolerant and an administrative whiz, Omar visited Jerusalem
soon after Muslim Arabs conquered the Holy City in 638. Omar revered
many of the Old Testament’s most significant personalities, and greatly
honored Judaism’s holy sites – including the peak on which Solomon
erected the magnificent First Temple.

Thus when he ascended to the Temple Mount and
found it overflowing with trash, Omar was enraged. He immediately
ordered the rubbish removed — and, say some, he helped clear it out with
his own hands.

At one point Jerusalem Bishop Sophronius
invited the Caliph to join him for prayers inside the Church of the Holy
Sepulcher. Omar is said to have refused, explaining that were he to
accept, Muslims might immediately ravish this most important of
Christian sites and replace it with a mosque dedicated to Islam. He then
proceeded to pray outside the church — exactly where a mosque named for
the Caliph is located today.